GridIron Systems: Mining Big Data 'Gold' in a Flash

Trends in the IT industry sometimes resemble gold rushes as vendors pan for revenue "nuggets." The use of solid state devices (SSDs)--most notably, flash memory--is the central point of one of these, but just as with the real 19th century gold rushes in California and Alaska, not all prospectors (that is, vendors) will be successful. Where the claims are staked can make all the difference in the world, and GridIron Systems is staking one with a focus on accelerating big data analyses.

The IT industry loves to give trends labels ("cloud," anyone?) and "big data" is the buzz label for one recent trend. Three distinguishing characteristics that are often noted with respect to big data are volume, variety and velocity. Volume is the quantity of data. Variety describes the fact that big data is not merely structured information (the familiar SQL type found in relational databases) but also includes semi-structured data (which is content-searchable) and unstructured data (which is bit-mapped data, such as video surveillance files). Velocity relates to the speed required to both capture big data and analytically process it. Read more here>>>>>